Are you listening to me?!… Measuring students’ engagement

What does a student look like when they’re not engaged in learning?

Slack jawed? Sleepy? Distracted? Angry?…..Absent?

And if they are engaged, what does that look like?…Excited? Talking critically about the topic? Full of ideas, enthusiasm and persistence? Anyone who has been a teacher probably has a gut feeling on what this looks like.

Student engagement measures have been shown to correlate positively with achievement and negatively with the likelihood of dropping out of school (Fredricks, Blumenfeld, and Paris 2004)

So, in theory, if you can identify students’ needs, evaluate and track engagement, you might be able to explore reasons behind the data and intervene accordingly. Perhaps.

Instruments for measuring engagement, as cited in the report, include:

Student self-report questionnaires

Teacher reports on students

Observational measures

The challenge, as this report acknowledges, is that engagement can be interpreted in different ways (social, behavioural, emotional…) – and the different tests measure different aspects. Which type of engagement leads to deep, transferable learning. Hmmm….